Bus Driver Jim has been an eclectic computer programmer and photographer since the early seventies. A recent twenty year stint in the transportation industry has earned him the handle and this blog is a documentary of his life and travels.

Monthly Archives: December 2016

The next time I enter into a relationship, I know what my first living together question is going to be. It’s not “do you mind if I sleep in my own bed”? Nope. Nor is it “do you mind if I eat dinner in my office”? Nope. The first thing I need to know is whether or not she’s going to pre-rinse the silverware before dropping them in the sink.

I do the dishes around here and I do them manually, no dish-washing machine in this house! There is nothing worse than to find a knife with sticky peanut butter on it stuck down in a water glass in the hopes it will soak off. It just doesn’t happen. Or a fork with mysterious stuff embedded between the little prongs.

Ok, the reality is, I’m not going to be asking those questions of anyone. Tomorrow is Steph’s and my fifteenth anniversary (can you believe it), and if that’s my biggest beef I guess I might as well just deal with it and rinse them off myself…

Steph noticed yesterday that a main support beam in our living room vaulted ceiling has a big crack running down it’s length. As I laid in bed last night hoping for visions of dancing sugar plum fairies all I could think about was the ramifications of our roof collapsing under the weight of wet heavy snow.

So I took the big long snow scraping tool out today and brought a bunch of snow down. While I was out there I noticed that some animal, either a moose or a deer, had walked through the yard to munch on a tree. Yea, I guess winter is finally here…

It was an interesting time here in the Valley today. A major storm was dumping on us and the roads were bogging down quickly after yesterday’s rain-snow mix. Around 1000 I went on break early and jumped in my truck and drove to Broulims to stock up on food when my dispatcher called me just as I was grabbing some eggs to inform me that TRPTA was shutting down service due to the storm.

She suggested that perhaps I could get my afternoon kids in Victor early and drive them home. I told her that was not such a good idea since I just transport those kids to the Community Center in Driggs every day and I had no idea where each one lived. Venturing off into unknown sideroads in whiteout conditions was not my idea of shutting down service, and she concurred, so we just told the school to have the parents come get them. I went back to the base, secured my bus and barely made it out of the lot and back through my driveway to home.

Tonight Steph took a snow shovel to the driveway which was plowed this morning right after we left for work. I think I’ll just hunker down this weekend…

My main ride (802) went down this morning with rear light issues and I had to slide over into our backup bus, 845. This is an old friend of mine, I drove her for many years a few years back and I’m surprised to see just 130K miles.

I’ve been putting up with a lot of little issues with my big ol 802 (no am/fm radio, one camera out, rear heater out and the little knobby on my two-way antenna was lost to the cold some time ago), just so I could keep 16 seats up here (yesterday afternoon every seat had a kid in it), but I finally had to put her down for a rest when my brake lights and rear tail-lights went south.

I snapped this shot of 845 with my new little Amazon tablet and it came out long…